Child Sexual Offender Data
Debate between Sarah Champion and Jamie Stone(1 week, 5 days ago)
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Jamie Stone
Indeed. The hon. Member has some knowledge, as I do, of the situation north of the border. The point is well made—I shall come to it shortly—that this crime is no respecter of where in the United Kingdom someone lives. Only by prioritising the identification of unreported abuse can we begin to address the true scale of the problem, rather than merely documenting its aftermath, retrospectively.
The petition makes particular reference to “gang based crime”. Many hon. Members will be aware of previous inquiries into this particular offence and its severity, which should not be undermined. However, we must remember that children can be sexually abused in many different ways by different people and in different places and situations. I think that is precisely the point to which my Scottish colleague, the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont), alluded.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for the reasoned caveats that he lays out, but in the case of Rotherham, the gangs that were grooming and abusing young children in my constituency were predominantly of Pakistani heritage. That mattered because, had we recognised it early on, we might have been able to disrupt and prevent some of the abuse. In specific cases, we need this data and we need to be transparent. Sometimes all the caveats in the world just dilute what should be a laser focus on protecting children.
Jamie Stone
Wise words indeed.
To turn to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) touched on earlier, in England and Wales alone almost half of all child sexual abuse offences reported to the police in 2021 and 2022 took place in the family environment. That means the abuse was by parents, siblings, grandparents or anyone considered one of the family. After sexual abuse by a parent, harmful sexual behaviour by siblings is the second most common form of sexual abuse within the family environment that is reported to police.
My point is that we must be cautious about framing child sexual abuse as primarily an external or culturally othered threat, when the evidence shows that it is most often perpetrated within existing relationships of trust and care. I suggest that overemphasising outside narratives risks distorting public understanding and could distract from the full range of contexts in which abuse occurs.